Recently, in a large number of information systems (hereafter, described also as systems, simply), their configurations are managed by describing configuration information as a structured document. Particularly, for the purpose of deploying a system into a cloud infrastructure, it is widely performed to describe configuration information about constituent elements of the system, such as a VM (virtual machine) and a network, as a structured document and manage it as a configuration definition file. In that case, the configuration information is collectively described, for example, in a description syntax or format such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and JSON (JavaScript (registered trademark) Object Notation).
Such a configuration definition file has an advantage in handling of structured documents (for example, partial cut out, copy and reuse are easy). It accordingly enables to construct a complicated information system adapted to individual requirements relatively easily by combining design patterns.
To deploy a system into an execution environment according to a configuration definition file, descriptions about deployment tools for deploying respective constituent elements are further incorporated in the configuration definition file. Such descriptions about deployment tools include, for example, those about start-up of the deployment tools, data transfer among the deployment tools and a start-up sequence of the deployment tools in accordance with dependency relationships among the constituent elements.
An example of such a deployment tool is disclosed in NPL1. In the deployment tool disclosed in NPL1, CloudFormation of Amazon Web Service (registered trademark) (hereafter, described as AWS), a deployment sequence of constituent elements is controlled by an attribute named DependsOn described in a configuration definition file. Also in other deployment tools such as Puppet and Chef, the dependency relationships and setting sequence can be controlled similarly, and these tools are widely used for deployment of various systems.
To further promote the efficiency of configuration management and deployment of a system, it is demanded to apply such a configuration definition file as described above to system deployment into a plurality of different environments.
However, it is general that a description syntax or format of such a configuration definition file is fixedly determined according to deployment tools available in an environment. Accordingly, to apply (reuse) a configuration definition file created for a certain environment to system deployment into another environment, conversion of the format of the configuration definition file is required.
For example, it is assumed that in a configuration definition file to deploy a system configured with a VM and software on the VM into an AWS environment, configuration information for the VM is described in the CloudFormation format and that for the software is described in the Cookbook format. The Cookbook format is a description format used in the above-mentioned deployment tool Chef. When deploying the same system into a Microsoft (registered trademark) Azure environment (hereafter, described as an Azure environment), it is necessary to convert the above-mentioned formats of the pieces of configuration information in the configuration definition file into formats defined by deployment tools available in the Azure environment.